Written by Duana


What is the Huffington Post? I mean, I know, but what is the mandate, exactly? I had to look this up, and the long and involved description told me very little about why they actually printed this article in which Taylor Swift was accused of having incurred a parent’s ‘regret’.

No I’m serious. A mother took her children to a Taylor Swift concert, was scandalized at what she saw there, and regrets that she took them. Oh, and her 12-and-a-half year old daughter regretted it too, because she is wise to the ways in which she was being sold a product. Except no, she totally isn’t. And she didn’t say that. She is 12 years old.

The article says that the Cover Girl sponsorship booth, the ‘hair flipping’, and the dancers took the woman’s daughters out of the guitar-playing, intimate experience they had hoped for. (But not her husband.) Oh, and this woman mentions that the last time she saw a concert it was the Indigo Girls. Which I assume was not in a STADIUM.

I mean, what???

Why do we do this? Why do we take a quality that some young person has, like sincerity, or dance ability or a taste for the outlandish, and push it to its extremes before it’s considered valued?

Taylor Swift who is a PRODUCT, who is selling her brand of emotional nakedness one piece at a time, does a great job at saying hey, I’m a young girl, I’m making some emotional choices all over the place, I’m not perfect. (Are you watching The Glee Project? I heard ‘Back To December’ performed and I don’t think I knew the lyrics were that…I don’t know, pedantic? It’s almost adorable.) She’s being Taylor Swift as hard as she knows how to be.

So what is the problem? Is it that she’s coiffed? That she’s slim? Are we not going to be happy until we see her drunk, disheveled, having had a nipple slip? Then will she be authentic? We don’t want that for Taylor, right? We screech up and down about how she can’t be a clone of some of the ‘bad’ kids who have gone before her? (Please note ‘bad’ kids appears to be anyone who has had any sort of age-appropriate relations with an alcohol bottle or has publicly had a boyfriend or has pressed herself up against him in her bikini for paparazzi she “didn’t know was there.” I.e. everyone over the age of sixteen. )

Stop doing this to young women, please. Stop creating such ridiculously high standards for behavior that are impossible for them to achieve, and then criticizing the minute fragile strands of things are revealed that aren’t exactly the way you would bring up your child.

PUBLIC FIGURES ARE NOT THERE SO THAT YOU CAN BRING UP YOUR CHILD IN THEIR IMAGE. PLEASE QUIT THIS.

Taylor Swift is a boy lover and a musician and probably a drama queen and a hugely successful entrepreneur and gives to charity and likes sparkly dresses and can’t sing that well and by all accounts is very nice to everyone who works for her.

I.e, she has some qualities you like, and some you don’t, right? And this is a mixed bag and maybe I like some of the ones you find distasteful and vice versa? Why is she a model for who your children should be any more than, say, that one girl on So You Think You Can Dance who has nice hair? (I assume there is this person. Right?) What are you really saying?

Please, please stop. Entertainers are not there to show your child how to be. YOU do that. Sheesh.

Attached - Taylor Swift performs in St Louis on August 14th.


Photos from Wenn.com